


The Heart is a (not) a Machine

by devera



Category: Terminator Salvation (2009)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 15:37:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1095702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devera/pseuds/devera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Time travel. No one ever said it made life any easier.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Heart is a (not) a Machine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [edriss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/edriss/gifts).



He doesn’t remember the first few days after the surgery. All he remembers is a hazy sense of movement and the bone deep rhythmic thrum of what he thought was his failing heart but realises was actually the blades of the chopper cutting through the air as they transported him from their forward base back to HQ.

He remembers his wife’s face, and his father’s. He thinks of him as that, even though Kyle Reese will never know it, even though he’s only seventeen right now. But John remembers. He remembers the way his mother used to talk about him. There wasn’t much to say - after all, she didn’t really know him for that long - but when she did talk about him, he remembers her voice, the look on her face that softened her honed features back to the edges of a glow that used to warm him right down to his toes when he saw it. If it’s possible to love a person on sight, he thinks maybe his mother did. He thinks maybe he does too. He can’t explain it, but there’s something there, a connection. When Reese had looked at him, his struggling heart had strained just that little bit harder in an effort to hold on.

Everything after that is a big long blank until he wakes up properly. When he does, it takes him while - a good long while lying in his bed in the infirmary while one of the junior medics is busy and unaware on the other side of the room - to put the last few things he does remember together: the T-800, like a nightmare from his past; Wright; Kate; Kyle Reese; Skynet Central going supernova. In that order. But there’s something else, later - Kate’s tears and Kyle’s expression and Marcus looking at him, his eyes soft and vulnerable and his mouth a tight, determined line...

He doesn’t realise that he’s remembered until the medic catches him trying to tear at the dressing where they- where he thinks they-

Christ.

He’s calm again when Kate arrives almost five minutes later, her face a mask of professional concern muting the more personal worry in her eyes.

“How do you feel?” she asks, an eye on the EKG as she speaks. His fingers twitch, but he doesn’t move them towards his chest again.

“Like new,” he tells her. “One part of me at least. Jesus, Kate.”

Her eyes fly to his face, flashing alarm, but she’s not apologetic, he can see that much.

“He offered, John. And I couldn’t... Not if there was a chance.”

He catches her hand, and she grips it back, almost too tightly. Christ, he knows. He knows, but…

“I know,” he sighs, and closes his eyes. He would have done the same, but there’s a part of him that would have hesitated the way Kate never would, would have measured lives in terms of how they could best be used in the war, in terms of the purpose he might be able to have them serve. He loves her. He’s never loved anyone more, but he’s too used to making sacrifices for the greater good and he thinks if it had been her lying there on that table he would have hesitated.

“How’s the baby?” he asks, because to be perfectly honest he doesn’t have the energy to peer any further than that into the dark places he knows are inside him, and at least he can do this right, he thinks. Kate’s face breaks into that luminous smile he fell in love with so long ago.

“Fine,” she says, voice strong and warm as a hand slides across her ripened belly. “Good. He’s good. He’s grown another two inches in the last week.”

He reaches for her, slides his own hand along under hers, feeling the baby shift underneath his palm, and something in his chest aches. He’d call it his heart, but that would be inaccurate, because it isn’t.

++++

He’s up and about two days later. Kate keeps looking at him like he’s a miracle, but she’s the only one. Everyone else is… careful. He’s not sure whether it’s because no one’s attempted a heart transplant since before the machines, or because the heart Kate transplanted was one. Technically it’s not true, of course. Wright’s heart was human, just portions of the infrastructure that supported it wasn’t. That’s not what John thinks about when he’s lying in bed at night, though, Kate breathing softly in sleep beside him. He puts his fingers against his carotid artery and counts the steady metronome of his pulse and what he thinks about is how, for all his humanity, Wright was a part of them, and now they’re a part John.

He has no idea what that means, or even whether it matters.

+++++

He sees Kyle Reese in the south corridor as he’s coming back from Stores. It’s been a little over a week since he woke up and against his doctor wife’s orders he’s not been idle. There’s too much to do. The Resistance is without leadership and the war continues. The signal Skynet gave them may have been designed to trace them, but the concept is solid and if they can find a way to exploit what they've learned then it could change the tide of battle. He needs to know how many other T-800 production facilities there are out there, because there's no way that was the only one, but he has a feeling it was the only one to have cracked the level of biological integration they’d managed to achieve with Wright. Skynet probably considers him a flawed design and if that’s the case, they’ll be focused on trying to determine the source of the flaw - a fruitless endeavour on their part; Marcus wasn’t flawed, he was human. But even to come to that conclusion will take time, and blowing up that lab will have been a massive blow to them in more than the obvious ways.

John is probably lucky he has Marcus’ heart; he probably wouldn’t be able to keep up without it. As it is, he’s been sleeping a maximum of three hours a night since he got out of the infirmary, and normally he’d feel like he’d been hit by a Terminator but instead he feels… invigorated. He wasn’t joking when he’d told Kate he felt like new; he actually does.

But it's not until he see's Reese that he realises something else about himself. He's been avoiding him. The awareness makes his step falter just a little.

Reese looks up from his contemplation of the ground under his boots, exhaustion in every line of his lanky body, and when he recognises John, his expression flickers like a candle in the dark, small and vulnerable and hopeful. It makes something in John's chest ache all over again.

“Hey,” Reese says by way of greeting when they get close enough, but his tone is guarded, careful. "Heard you were on your feet again."

John nods in acknowledgement, but he has no idea what to say and maybe that's why he's been avoiding him. His gaze drops, catches on Reese's sleeve and the splash of red there.

“You can, uh, have it back now, if you want. Your coat, I mean.”

For a second, John doesn't understand what Reese is talking about, but then he realises the kid's still wearing his coat. He shakes his head.

“No. Keep it,” he says. “I said you earned it, and I meant it. You look like you’ve been out.”

Reese shrugs. “West perimeter patrol. Three days. It’s quiet. For now.”

John feels something cold wash through his bloodstream, like Wright’s heart has stopped working for just long enough to notice.

“Who issued those orders?”

Reese blinks at him, his youthful face (did John look like that when he was young, that open, that unguarded?) blank in confusion at John’s tone.

“Barnes did. We have five hundred new bodies to house. It’s as crowded as hell in there at the moment, and he wanted to get a lay of the land a bit further from base, see if we can’t settle them at a sub camp we can still support. Why?”

John wants to tell him. He wants to shout. He didn’t go Rambo on a major Skynet installation for four hundred and ninety-nine people; he did if for one, just one; this one. He’ll be damned if Reese, or Barnes for that matter, waste it all - Wright’s sacrifice and John’s heart, not to mention the future of humanity - because Reese steps on a mine or gets taken out by a lone patrol or some other random mishap.

"Nothing," he makes himself say. "Good work. As you were."

Reese gives him a quizzical look, like John's suddenly speaking another language or something, but underneath that, as John walks away, there's something more, something like disappointment, the flicker John had seen in Reese’s eyes doused.

John tells himself it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that Reese stays alive.

+++++

He has the five hundred refugees transferred to the Lake Powell settlement the following week. Incidentally, Reese is sent with them. He doesn’t like it, John can tell; and for that matter, Kate doesn’t think much of it either, but John remains resolute, and Reese doesn’t argue. Orders are orders, after all.

John’s under few illusions that it’s an ideal solution, but it’s the only one he can think of. Reese away from the front lines in an active military base where he won’t be able to willingly walk out into trouble or get caught in a random Skynet sweep is the best John can manage. Skynet can’t kill him if they can’t find him and Lake Powell is well inland of the limits that the machines have been known to venture. As far as John knows, the settlement is completely off their grid. It’s the only place he can send Reese where he’ll be anything even approaching safe.

Besides, John tells himself, there’s vital work to be done out there. The Resistance needs settlements like Powell, where humanity is slowly reestablishing itself, where people are growing food and doing something other than getting themselves killed. They can't all be soldiers, otherwise there'd be nobody left, and Reese is good with people. This is the best thing John can do for him. He'll be fine.

+++++

And he is, for a while.

+++++

That ends three and a half years later. The Resistance has been making some headway in the war. Three more major facilities destroyed - one in Houston, one in Duluth and the third in Seattle. It's progress at a cost, but it’s a cost John is willing to budget for because they’re getting close, he can almost feel it. As is the day, of course, when he will have to send Reese back. He hasn't forgotten, but he tries not to think about it too closely. He gets weekly reports from the settlements and he tries not to take too much interest in what Reese is doing out at Powell, but he's always just a little disappointed that Reese is never on the other end of the line.

When the news comes, it’s not via the radio; it’s Williams standing in front of his desk, her face pale as a ghost.

"Say that again," he says, hoping for a second that he's somehow misheard. He's pretty sure Wright's heart actually stops working for the full two seconds it takes her to breath in to answer.

"The machines just hit the Lake Powell camp,” she repeats. "There's four squads heading out there right now, and we don’t know how many might have survived yet, but they haven’t answered any hails since the mayday went out.”

John stands up on legs that suddenly don't feel strong enough to support him.

“I’m going out there. Get my team to suit up. We’re wheels up in ten.”

++++

The Lake Powell settlement from the air looks like a wasteland, when once it was a lush, green, thriving community. The buildings the two thousand inhabitants lived in are broken husks, the fields they tended smouldering and ruinous.

Christ. The weren't supposed to come out this far. How did the machines get out this far and he not hear about it?

His squad hits the dirt on touchdown and Williams and the other pilots are gone again in less than fifteen seconds while John and his teams advance, weapon raised. He already knows the machines are gone; they're not exactly subtle after all. They’ve left devastation and death in their wake, and as he starts ghosting cautiously across the compound grounds with his team behind him and the other squads fanning out in different directions, checking for survivors, he tells himself he’s got to remain calm. If Reese was dead, surely John would know about it. The present would collapse in some kind of nightmarish paradox of time travel and John would cease to exist somehow, or drop dead on the spot or something, Wright’s unstoppable heart or no. Surely he’d know.

The bodies that they find are barely recognisable. The ones not buried under the rubble of collapsed buildings are charred, twisted effigies. He can’t do anything for them except bury them, but there has to be survivors. This is not two thousand people he’s seeing here; this is a line of defence, soldiers fallen protecting someone else’s retreat. He can see how the tactics played out in his mind as he nears one of the largest buildings - where they stood, where they fell back, where they were overrun but something isn’t adding up apart from the numbers. He looks around, sees the scopes of his other teams flickering through the darkness and smoke and they’re heading in the same direction as he is, following the same trails, heading to the same building.

John is praying when he sidles up to the building and reaches for the door. He’s praying that he doesn’t find the rest of the settlement piled up inside, the same as the men on the outside. But when he slips through, scope swinging to his blind spots in the darkness, he doesn’t find anything of the sort. He finds, well, nothing.

Or almost nothing. Movement to his right, sound; the slight scuff of a footfall. He swings in its direction, half his squad doing the same, their lights hitting a figure he hadn’t seen standing in a doorway on the far side of the building, rifle scope trained dead centre of John’s chest.

“Hey,” the figure says through the muffling layers of scarves around his face. The M4A1 pointing at John lowers slightly and then one gloved hand comes up to grip at the wrappings and jerk them down and somehow, even though the face is almost a stranger’s, John knows.

"You’re late, man," Kyle Reese says, and his voice has deepened in the three and a half years he's been gone. “The party’s already over.”

+++++

John can’t get over how he looks - different, like he's filled out in ways that have finally taken from him all illusion of youth, his features catching up to reflect what his eyes always said, that the world was a hard, painful place and that you had to fight for every second you were in it. And Reese has fought, but it looks like the whole settlement was fighting with him.

“They already had this going when I got here,” Reese is explaining as he leads John and his men underground. It looks like a bunker, or a series of them. John didn’t even know these were here and for some reason, no one at Powell saw fit to tell him. “They knew it was only a matter of time before they got big enough to notice. They swore us to secrecy.” By us, John guesses he means the refugees from the Central raid. “Sorry. Anyway, this is only part of it.”

He ushers them through a bunker door, and John doesn’t know what’s more impressive - the size of the cavern, or the fact that there’s almost two thousand people down here going about their business like they haven’t just been attacked by Skynet.

“There’s other bunkers?” he asks, a little awed.

“No,” Reese says, looking a little smug. “There’s other defences. They have a decoy system, John, and we just successfully field tested it.”

+++++

The system in question, when John is given the tour by the Powell techs, is a network of generator powered heat exchanges that run to the surface and daisy chain all over the settlement. From the control room, they can transfer heat signatures that the machines will read as bioelectrical to whatever locations they want. They can turn them on and off with a flick of a switch, the idea being that when the machines attacked, Powell could concentrate heat signatures to one side of the camp to give people time on the other side to evacuate underground. They could then concentrate heat in one place - one empty place - and let the machines go to town while they turned off the exchanges like, well, lives being snuffed.

And it worked. It worked beautifully. That’s what John was seeing topside - fire concentrated in all the wrong places, and no bodies to show for it. They basically led the machines around by the nose. Skynet thought it had eliminated its targets and with no more targets, had left. It’s utterly ingenious.

They only problem is, they needed someone on the surface with a walkie talkie to coordinate the decoy signals. Guess who’d volunteered for that job.

John wants to smack his own head against a wall when he finds out, but then again, there’s a certain sense of resignation involved too. If Kyle Reese can’t stay out of trouble even somewhere like this, John should probably just accept the fact that it’s never going to happen. Of course, that doesn’t mean he can’t brood about it, which is what he’s doing when Reese finds him top side again, staring out at the still smouldering compound watching teams pick up the bodies of the men that volunteered to buy the rest of the settlement time.

“So,” Reese says eventually, leaning against the same window sill and looking in the same direction John’s gaze is turned. “I guess you’re pretty mad, huh?”

John shifts, looks at Reese in surprise that he’s somehow been caught out.

“Why do you say that? I couldn’t be happier. You protected the civilians and the supplies. You did your job.”

“Oh,” Reese says, sounding tense. “That’s good. Because I thought my job was to be as far away from you as humanly possible. That is why you sent me out here in the first place, right? Fuck knows why. I thought for a long time that maybe I did something wrong, that you blamed me for Marcus or something...”

“No,” John says, wondering at the strangeness of someone saying that name aloud again after all this time. “Wright- I’m… grateful for what he did. I should have died.”

"Then it’s just about me,” Reese concludes harshly. “And I still can’t work it out. Either you hate me or you really, really don’t want to like me. Fair enough, I suppose. You’ve got a wife and a son. I get it. And I was seventeen, wasn’t I. Probably the whole idea just freaked you out, so you sent me away.”

“Kyle...” John starts, turning towards him, trying to work out what to say and how to say it.

“I’m a little over the mixed signals here, John.”

“What mixed-” John starts to say, except suddenly Reese’s fist is curling in John’s flac jacket and yanking John forward and-

Holy shit.

John jerks back, but the feel of Reese’s mouth-

Reese stares at him a moment, and his eyebrows twitch down briefly. “Okay,” he says after another moment. “Now I’m _really_ confused.”

He’s not the only one. John stares back. His heart - Marcus’ heart - is hammering in his chest, and suddenly he starts actually _hearing_ what Reese has been saying, and the conversation abruptly makes a warped kind of sense. Reese thinks that he-

“You think that I…? No. No, that’s not…”

“Right,” Reese says sharply. “You didn’t even know me, but you stormed Central to rescue me, welcomed me like a _son."_ His voice breaks a little on the word, and John feels that ache again. God damn malfunctioning machine heart. But Reese doesn't flinch, doesn't look away, even when John can see in his face how he must feel. |"And then you sent me away like you couldn’t stand the sight of me. What the hell am I supposed to think?"

John can't answer. He doesn't know how. Reese faces his silence for a few seconds longer.

"Fine," he says when John doesn't speak, and his voice is tight, and a stranger's. "Never mind. I guess I was wrong.” He starts to turn away, and there’s the shadow of something on his face as he does, something John remembers from the week before he transferred him to Powell, like the flickering of a flame as it goes out. “I’m going back down-”

“You’re important,” John all but blurts, his hand shooting out to clutch at Reese’s arm and stop him from leaving because something in him is panicking, is telling him he can’t let Reese walk away, can’t walk away from Reese either, not this time. “Not just… not just to me, but to everything. I can’t explain it. No. That’s not true. I _can_ explain it, but if I tell you, it could change everything.”

Reese pauses, looks at him strangely, still with that dark, distant look of pain on his face.

“Yeah, well, that’s the risk sometimes. But it doesn’t have to mean anything. You’ve got Kate, and Peter, and another one on the way, yeah? I get it. It’s not like I’d say anything. Or get in the way.”

He still doesn’t get it, and how can he when the truth is so much stranger still? John swallows, feels like he’s balancing on a knife edge here. On one hand, he feels a connection to Reese that words can’t even begin to define, and Reese feels it too; that’s obvious now. That’s he’s misinterpreted it spectacularly is beside the point. John tried to ignore it, tried to lock it down, but it just keeps seeping out through the cracks. He’s sent Reese as far away as he can, but somehow it hasn’t changed anything.

“You don’t understand,” he says, and thinks maybe his hand is trembling, but he can't seem to unlock it from Reese's arm. “I knew who you were before we met. I knew Skynet was after you, is still after you.”

Reese frowns at him. “You mean, you knew when you sent me out here? That they’d come? Just for me?”

“Yes,” John confesses.

Reese reels back, like John’s struck him, pulling his arm out of John’s grip.

“And you sent me _anyway_?”

“I hoped you were out of Skynet’s reach! Off the grid!” John defends. “They never come out this far. The logistics involved, the resources… I needed to put you as far away from them as possible. As it is, if they’d seen you, if they’d recognised you, not even that bunker could have saved you.”

“ _Why_? What _possible reason_ could you have for putting this settlement and all these people in that kind of-”

“Because you have to go back, Kyle! If you don’t make it, then it’s all over. Everything. All that we’ve worked for, fought for, _died_ for, it’s all over.”

“Back where?” Reese grates. “ _What’s_ over? You’re not making any sense!” But John can see - there’s something in his eyes, a new kind of fear that John’s never seen in anyone else’s face but his own, and John doesn’t know how to make that go away without messing everything up.

“Skynet built-” John starts, then corrects himself,  “- _will_ build a device. A time machine.”

Reese hesitates. “That’s ridiculous.”

“It’s a reality,” John counters. “And I need you alive, so that I can send you back, because I can’t go myself.”

Reese stares at him, looks almost afraid to ask. “Back when?”

“Before Judgement Day,” John says. “To save my mother.”

Of course, considering the potential for disaster that a few words hold, whenever he’d imagined having this conversation, he hadn't imagined Kyle Reese laughing.

“You want me to protect your _mom_?" he demands incredulously. "In the _past_? John, that’s crazy. And even if it wasn’t, why the hell couldn’t you send just anyone?”

“It has to be you,” John says shortly. “Don’t ask me why, because I can’t say, but you’re the only one who can do it and that’s why Skynet will try to kill you.”

Reese stares at him a little longer. “You’re serious, aren’t you.” He sounds like he almost believes him. “And you sent me away to _protect_ me?”

“Yes.”

“Right,” Reese snaps. “And how the fuck has that worked out for you so far?”

The question is completely warranted, but John can’t remember the last time anyone spoke to him like that. For a second, it sounds exactly like something his mother would have said, and maybe he’s a little hysterical here, but the idea suddenly strikes him as really, incredibly funny.

“Well,” he snorts, trying not to smile and likely failing if the look on Reese’s face is anything to go by. “Pretty well before today.”

“If you think I’m staying here when I’m just a target…” Reese begins warningly, looking at John like he’s crazy for all the wrong reasons. “I’m not putting the people here at risk any longer.”

“I know,” John sighs. That much has on some level been obvious since he set foot in the bunker. “I guess you’ll just have to come with me instead. Maybe if I keep you close, I can stop you from getting killed.”

“I’ve managed just fine until now,” Reese says, sounding for a moment like the kid John has thought of him as for the last three years, and for some reason it makes him smile just a little more. He makes his own fate, he reminds himself, and whatever Kyle Reese would have been until John met him in 2029, things have changed. Reese never mentioned Wright to his mother, so who knows, maybe Wright never existed in other timelines. But he existed in this one. He gave John a heart and another chance, and he brought John and Reese together. John doesn’t believe in predestination as much as he used to. Maybe he and Reese together can keep Reese alive until he has to go back. If they can’t, well, John will plan for that eventuality as much as he can.

“Yeah,” John agrees, and reaches out to place a hand back on Reese’s shoulder, squeezes. “I think I’m starting to see that.”

Reese looks at him, and then smiles a little as John drops his hand again. They both turn to look back out across the compound, companionably silent for a moment.

“So,” Reese says after a while. “Totally platonic here then.”

John cuts him an alarmed look, realises by the sidelong smirk he sees Reese is giving him that he’s joking and laughs.

“Trust me,” he says. “Totally.”

**Author's Note:**

> I had no idea what I was taking on when I decided to fill this Yuletide request, as opposed to one of the other ones. The Terminator movies and related media are, I discovered to my horror, a tangle of narrative knots impossible to unravel, but I'd always wanted to see more out there about Conner and Reese and how they were friends, so I decided to write my version of the beginnings of their friendship using T4 (because I have a bit of a thing for Bale, ok, don't judge) as a springboard. I think I created another timeline in doing so, but hey, what's one more, right?
> 
> I hope you enjoyed this, Recipient. Merry Yuletide ❤


End file.
